Translating Identity-Based Motivation to Intervention: Pathways to Success from School to Jobs and Life

Abstract

In this chapter I describe the school-to-jobs intervention, a brief inter¬vention that translates the components of identity-based motivation (IBM) into a testable, usable, feasible, and scalable intervention for use in schools and other settings to improve academic outcomes. To develop the intervention, I took the core IBM principles and translated them into a framework and set of activities that have coherence and meaning. These core principles, as detailed in Chapter 1, are that identities, strategies, and interpretations of difficulty matter when they come to mind and seem relevant to the situation at hand. Because thinking is for doing, context matters, and identities, strategies, and interpretations of difficulty can be dynamically constructed given situational constraints and affordances. Therefore the framework and set of activities I developed were sensitive to the context in which education and educational success or failure occurs, the processes by which children succeed or fail to attain their school-success goals, and the action children need to take if they are to succeed. The intervention was fully tested twice (Oyserman, Bybee, & Terry, 2006; Oyserman, Terry, & Bybee, 2002), using random assignment to control (school as usual) and intervention conditions so that it would be possible to know whether the effects were due to the intervention and not to other differences in the children themselves. Importantly, the tested intervention was manualized and fidelity to both manual and underlying theorized process was also tested. In these ways, the intervention stands as a model for development. STJ is currently being used in England and in Singapore. Each country gives the intervention its own name to fit the context. This chapter is divided into three parts. In the first part, I outline the choices I made in developing the intervention. In the second part, I outline the sequenced activities that constitute the intervention (they are detailed in the manual that forms Chapter 4). In the third part, I describe the evidence that the intervention succeeded in changing academic outcomes and that changes occurred through the process predicted by IBM.